


All the Patrician’s Horses

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Discworld
Genre: Assassination, Drug Use, Gen, Lord Snapcase, Poison, Ridiculousness, Scorpion Pit, Seriousness, Song Lyrics, Too many Julius Caesar references, coup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:33:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24314341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: In which the entire Assassins Guild inhumes Lord Snapcase, Havelock Vetinari’s singing voice was born in the wrong generation and maybe the real toxicology was the friends we made along the way
Relationships: Lord Downey & Havelock Vetinari
Comments: 2
Kudos: 27





	All the Patrician’s Horses

“I’m sorry, but did you just break _into_ the Scorpion Pit?” Downey was standing on the outside of the thick iron door, peering through a mesh panel at the slightly younger man who was currently, as far as he could tell, suspended from the ceiling by silk bedsheets and half-humming half-singing. Downey could hear the arthropods crawling over each other on the floor far below. 

“Scorpions, you see—“ Havelock twisted in the air, changing how the silk was wrapped around his body, “ _The party’s overrrr, it’s time to call it a day—_ have quite good hearing for things that don’t have any ears— _And taken the moon awayyyyy._ ” Havelock’s singing voice wasn’t bad so much as deliberately raw and ragged. It was a voice for Music with Rocks In, which wouldn’t be invented for well over a decade. The only singing he’d done in the Assassins Guild had been in the shower. “They’re covered in tiny hairs that pick up vibrations in the air— _the piper must be paid—_ even at higher frequencies— _flicker and dim, the party’s over—_ so what I’m doing is stressing them out.”

“It’s stressing me out.”

“Whoever opens the door— _Now you must wake up, all dreams must end_ —is not going to leave the dungeons alive.”

“And that’s where I come in, is it?”

“You have the list.”

“You mean the list of everyone who’s made our lives a hell for the past decade that you have kindly enumerated and paginated since your aunt is paying us to get rid of them?”

“ _It’s all over, my friend. Yes, it’s over my friend._ ”

“See you on the flip side, Dog Botherer.”

“That’s Patrician to you, in T-minus 42 minutes, Dr. Downey.” Havelock flipped upside down, his shoulder-length hair hanging inches away from the seething mass of Scorpions. 

Three years ago Downey and Vetinari had been commissioned to inhume each other. 

Downey had chosen to use Hemlock, because he had standards and Vetinari had chosen to use Strychnine because he knew Downey had access to Hemlock. 

As a master poisoner, Downey could calculate a dose that came just shy of fatal that would actually sedate and analgize Vetinari. 

Strychnine had been used as a high-risk stimulant for hundreds of years. Unlike Vetinari, Downey was unlikely to panic from elevated nervous activity. 

These poisons had been chosen for how close the fatal dose was to the pleasurable. 

In one of the Guild’s basement common rooms, the two graduate students very visibly slipped something into each other’s over-sweet port and obnoxiously floral herbal tea.

Vetinari lowered himself to the floor as he drained the last drop of liquid. “Don’t stand up,” he warned, “stay on the sofa. There might be convulsions.”

“Strychnine?”

Havelock closed his eyes. Hemlock was technically an opioid or narcotic, defined loosely, and neither of those things defined precisely. “Yes, strychnine.”

“How much?”

“It’s exam season at the university.”

“Good man, Dog Botherer.”

Vetinari smiled at the ceiling. They would be found within the hour. Dr. Follett would report a near fatal failure of both contracts and make it look like the problem lay in taking them both out at the same time. 

After some minutes of silence and total stillness Downey said “Havelock?” sounding scared. 

Vetinari reached his hand up to meet Downey’s hanging off the sofa so he could feel his pulse. 

They were discovered by an undergraduate who dropped a coffee cup full of vodka on the granite tiles and gave a short scream as the cup shattered. It had been a commemorative collectable from a chamber music conference. 

Other students were not so disobedient with regard to contracts taken out on their classmates. It was a hard decade. Assassins left the city frequently. Some tried to turn in coursework by post but the unreliable postal service meant they often didn’t make it. The Assassin’s Guild had a one hundred percent graduation rate for surviving students, the operative word being ‘surviving.’ Both the class of ‘66 and ‘68 had been made to kill real people on the Run. It was terrifying how much Vetinari drank that night, but he claimed he’d never learned how to get drunk and was operating on the vain hope that emptying his wallet would empty his brain. 

But now they had the opportunity to end a reign of terror. 

This is the plan as it was laid out to Downey:

Downey would arrange for a meeting to occur between Vetinari and Snapcase’s best advisor 

Vetinari would sway the loyalty of this advisor and commence succession negotiations. The fact that this advisor was, in fact, a horse allegedly posed no obstacle 

Vetinari would “set up a trap” [details redacted from plan for dramatic effect]

Downey would knock out a palace guard and steal his uniform (sometimes the old ways are the best ways) 

Downey would claim discovery of a disturbance and lead Snapcase’s cronies into Vetinari’s trap [details redacted]

Vetinari would check in with Snapcase’s warren of spies and take full note of their grievances. He would make some kind of agreement with the Barber-Surgeons... what was that thing the Agateans have... Drainage insects? Ants underground?

Downey would put a call out to every member of the Assassins Guild that Snapcase had ever commissioned 

They would be summoned to the Palace, surround Snapcase and be granted equal opportunity for retribution for the decade that had nearly destroyed the Guild

Then Downey would give a speech he had written and they’d all agree to pretend they didn’t know what had happened and Vetinari’s nomination was due to being an unassuming academic with a nose that would look good on coins—Don’t write that down! I’m not here... I’m a shadow on a wall... I don’t have a nose*

Astonishingly, it went off without a hitch. The piece-de-resistance was Snapcase’s contribution to making it look like Downey had masterminded the whole thing. His last words were “Et tu, Downey?”

Vetinari didn’t touch Snapcase. All he did was whisper, when he saw which of the many stab wounds was going to be fatal, “ _Truth, freedom, justice and reasonably priced love._ ”

Vetinari didn’t look like he got much sleep, and everyone knew that he read too much and didn’t listen to music. He tried not to look like he was watching everything and to hide his fleeting smiles that ‘mocked himself and scorned his spirit.’ 

It didn’t work as well as he thought it did, but people didn’t understand his ambitions then. They knew how to deal with selfish ambition and hunger for power, but what kind of tyrant wants to make things better?

*This was rather tasteless silliness given that support for the coup was incited by Snapcase forcing a thief to eat his own nose


End file.
